Use swimlanes to group work on a company-managed Jira board
10 min
Intermediate
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Use swimlanes to better visualize work
- Describe swimlane grouping methods
Use swimlanes to group work for better visibility
In company-managed boards, you can use swimlanes to group work horizontally, usually by field values. This allows your team to see the progress of work on your board within a category, like a specific initiative, a specific teammate, or a specific project, if your board includes multiple projects.
👉 For example: You can create a swimlane using the Assignee field. Then, each assignee has their work items in a separate horizontal section of the board. It’s now easy to identify what each assignee’s workload is.
👇Here’s an example of what Assignee swimlanes look like on a board.
To configure swimlanes:
- Open your board.
- Next to the board name, select More actions (represented by •••), then Board settings.
- In the sidebar, select Layout, then Swimlanes.
- Select what information you want to use for the swimlanes.
👇Here's where you configure swimlanes.
👇Click the boxes to see the information you can use to create swimlanes on either a kanban or scrum board.
Kanban boards have two swimlanes by default:
- Expedite: shows all work items with the highest priority setting, based on the Priority field (often the “Blocker” priority)
- Everything Else: shows all work items that do not match the JQL for the Expedite swimlane
Let's explore an example!
Su-jin’s team wants to see which work items on their board came from internal requests and which came from external requests. They already use the Component field to track if work items are Internal or External.
👇Click to explore what this example looks like in Jira.
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next lesson
Configure how fields appear on work items in company-managed projects
- Configure the layout for work items
- What can you change in the layout?
- Configure different layouts for work and request types
- What if a field you need isn’t available?